Categories or Tags

Categories, unlike tags, can have a hierarchy. You might have a Jazz category, and under that can have children categories for Bebop and Big Band. WordPress provided Categorys and Tags.

Categories allow for a broad grouping of post topics, when you need to describe a post in more specific terms you use Tags categories are similar tage required to describe your posts, categories generally and tages in more detail.

We understand that it may be a bit confusing upon first glance (especially to new bloggers), so here are some common questions and answers that will help

Do I have to use tags?

No, the use of tags is entirely optional but each post must have at least one category

Are categories and tags hierarchical?

Categories can be arranged in a hierarchy (see the categories widget to learn more) Tags exist in their own right and have no set relationship to anything else

Is Tag the same as tag ? Yes. Capitals letters do not change a tag. Bloggingis the same asblogging.

Is there a limit to the number of tags I can have? No, the sky. In other words there is no limit

Is there any advantage to using tags or categories, or both?

Your posts will appear in the global tag listings of any tags or categories you use. Therefore, assigning tags and categories to your post increases the chance that other users will see your contentbut you don’t want irrelevant content showing up on the global tag listings or search, That’s why we limit the number of tags that can be used on a public tag listing. Five to 10 tags (or categories, or a combination of the two) is a good number to add to each of your posts.

The more tags you use, the less likely it is that your post will be selected for inclusion in the global tag listings.

How are the archive URLs different for tags and categories? If you publish a post ‘P‘,attached to a category ‘A’, the URL will look like this : http://1stpro.com/cA/pP/ The same post using the tag ‘B’ will look like this : http://1stpro.com/tB/pP/ If you publish a post attached to a category ‘A’, and with the tag ‘B’, the URLs will look like this : http://1stpro.com/cA/tB/pP/ but if you take out the category in permalinks and don’t use a tag the URLs will look nice and clean like this : http://1stpro.com/pP/ we use one category ‘money’ for all our post so the URL for this post looks like this : http://1stpro.com/money/categories-or-tags/ take out the category permalink and just use ‘postname’ the URL will be very simple, like this : http://1stpro.com/categories-or-tags/Matt Cutts, CTO of Google, explains how they view tag clouds in the following video on whether tag clouds help or hinder SEO or whether they have little or no effect.

We think controversially one category for all your posts and unique labels (tags) for each post if you must, but don’t include categories tags in your XML Map or tags for that matter, forget all about the unique slug make everything the same, a slug is just another annoying bit of SEO you realy don’t need as are excerpts. trying to get the whole lot working as they should is just not worth the effort.

To recap : Onecategory for all post, map your posts, pages, and (unique labels “tages” if you must). Finally only put Posts, Pages and Media in the XML-Site-map, then Google and your visitors will love you, But if you must put tags in the XML Map don’t include canonical (The canonical link is shown on the archive page for this term) that means the URL will be stripped out of the xml-map and Google will see that as not found 404, more headaches you can do without.

However, if you still choose to use both categories and tags, be sure to only index one of them in your XML-Map to avoid duplicate content and the potential for Google penalties. You can use the ‘WordPress SEO’ to help fine tune how the search engines index.

5 Comments

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